How long did it take to produce an episode of Dragonball Z?

Smooth Criminal · Post by **Smooth Criminal** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 12:13 pm

This is something that has been on my mind for a while now.

If I'm speaking correctly, DBZ ran continuously from 1989 to 1996 with only occasional breaks due to baseball/other special events. But with such a constant stream of episodes, how far in advance would they have to make them in order to be ready for airing?

These were all drawn by hand, and then filmed manually.... Wouldn't that have taken an ungodly amount of time ? Also, different animation teams would have a certain number of episodes to produce (in non-sequential order, of course), so would they be working on a bunch of those simultaneously? If so, this would mean that the TV show scripts would have to be in the can FAR in advance, as the animation teams/producers were working separately from one another.

What was the difference in time producing an episode of "A" quality, versus an episode of "D" quality? For example, SSJ2 Goku's fight against Kid Buu versus any random 'Triangle Crap' episode, particularly in the Cell arc when it looked the worst and was used like every other episode.

Haseowolf · Post by **Haseowolf** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 12:47 pm

As for how long things were done in advance, the scripts and screen writes were done probably hand in hand with the manga. As each couple of chapters came out, screen adaptations were written then handed off to the animators.

The animation team does not make an episode every week, they most likely had about 26 episodes in production at a time with different teams working on each episode simultaneously as you suspected.

This is just how I think it would have been done.

Also, yes the episodes are drawn by hand, but as you might notice, there isn't all that much movement and thus frame animating to be done in a lot of episodes. Even the fights last for short bursts and then go back to static poses and talking.

ssjcj · Post by **ssjcj** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 3:54 pm

I remember watching a programme with The Simpsons and they said it took 9 months to create an episode. This, though, included planning and storyboard so for DragonBall you could probably cut a few weeks or months off that as they, of course, had the manga for the story.

ShinRogafuken · Post by **ShinRogafuken** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 4:46 pm

I know they didn't have to do as much with Kai than they did with the original Z, but still, with that logic, Kai was being worked on before they announced it.